


beati bellicosi

by gelato



Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bisexual!Maia Roberts, F/M, Gen, Government Conspiracy, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-05-20 15:33:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19379593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gelato/pseuds/gelato
Summary: Maia survives. The pack doesn't. And that's just the beginning.





	beati bellicosi

**Author's Note:**

> This is my self-gratuitous retelling of 'The Expanse' in the SH-verse, but also a rewrite of 3B in some ways. It loosely takes place after 3x13, but doesn't strictly follow all canon up until that episode. Really, this is all just an elaborate scheme to give Maia the focus she was due and dabble in some government conspiracies along the way. It also, if things go well, is a sloooooooooooooow burn for Bat/Maia. Have fun!

Maia tastes the sea in her mouth.

The salty air floods her senses, sharp and cool. She’s by the sea because she’s on a beach. The sand stretches to nowhere, yawning into the distance where it meets only the sky.

The sky hides the sun. Maia can’t see anything beyond the foggy vision of clouds, but she can still feel the sticky humidity in the air. Somehow, she still finds herself shivering.

“A day like this? I thought I’d have the beach all to myself.”

Maia frowns. Did she come here with Jordan? Turning to look at him, she finds him at the edge of her vision, just out of sight. Jordan’s face is turned away from her, and Maia follows his line of vision.

She thought the beach was empty, but she finds a family in that stretch of sand. A little girl, with tight curls pinned back by plastic barrettes. She’s digging with glee. Just next to her is a woman, with brown skin and her face shaded by a large floppy hat. She’s digging too, with her hands as she speaks to the toddler in low, hushed tones and shows her how to pack together a sandcastle.

Maia turns away.

The day she had met Jordan, they were alone. Maia knew that because she wanted to be alone, and she picked one of the most miserable days to be by the beach to do so. This couldn’t be a memory. And yet, Maia thought as the child shrieked happily, the image of the two tugged at her. A scratch at the deepest parts of her brain.

The girl starts to screech louder, but her mother doesn't turn to look. She keeps moving methodically: hands tucked into the sand, carrying mounds out of the ground, and packing it into the growing structure. Tuck, carry, pack. The girl’s pitch climbs higher. Tuck, carry, pack.

The sound was deafening now, roaring in the air as Maia finds herself able to do nothing as it went higher, higher, higher; Tuck, carry, pack…

Her ears are ringing. Maia tastes blood in her mouth.

-

She’s pulled into consciousness like quicksand. Slow, and then like a bullet her senses come back to her.

Her cheek, Maia finds, was digging into the linoleum floor. Her head was pounding, and her ears keep ringing. She opens her eyes slowly, feeling the strain of having shut them too tightly. There’s pain pooling somewhere across her face, throbbing sharply.

Maia tries curling her fingers and pushing up on her knuckles, and hisses as she discovers glass clenched between her fists.

And then she hears — everything.

Snarls and shrieking. The distinct sound of claws ripping through flesh. More glass breaking, and thud after thud of bodies slumping to the floor.

Breathing through her nose, Maia tries again to push herself up, forming half gasps every time more glass cuts into her palms. The effort sends shockwaves of dizziness through her, and she keeps pushing, up to her elbows, until —

A boot slams down on the center of Maia’s back, a _crack!_  hard enough to force the little breath she had out of her and dig her face back into the floor. She’s spasming in short wheezes, struggling to catch a gasp of air —

And the boot’s off as quick as it came. Air rushes back into Maia’ lungs as she registers a high-pitched shriek, followed by a hiss so sharp it slices through her eardrums. _Vampires_ , she realizes.

The pace in her heartbeat skips. Something’s not right. She needs to get up _now_.

Maia barely registers the sounds of grunts and growls and loud cries. She’s willing, pushing, all the energy left in her body to get herself off the ground when that goddamn boot knocks into her again. She bites her tongue in shock.

Maia’s fully aware now — there’s a fight happening over her. Someone in the pack making big, clumsy swipes at an overzealous vampire. He roars like a man in pain and keeps charging. And every single time Maia strains to kick herself off the ground, the same boot stomps back.

There must be cracks across her bones now, exhausted and all air punched out of her. And that’s when she realizes.

He wants her to stay down.

It’s like the thought sets off a hundred alarms in her head, clashing and clanging. First, confusion; the inescapable throbbing as she forces air back into her lungs and searches for an explanation. Stay down? Why would she choose — why would she have to stay down? While pack members are fighting for their lives, while these vamp zealots bear down on them in chaos…why….

Second: the bone-chilling realization like ice in her veins. Maia knows why she has to stay down. Like reading a sentence over and over until every slots and clicks into place, a gear grinding to a halt. The certifiable fact that if she stays down, they think she’s dead. And if she’s dead, she has a chance.

A chance to escape.

Maia doesn’t want to believe it, wants to fight the very idea. She screws her eyes tight, tracks of tears slipping down her face. One breath in. Then out. She doesn’t want to believe it. But she has to do it.

Maia gently uncurls her fingers, wills her chest to stop shaking for breath and angles her face imperceptibly toward the floor. _Play dead!_  she thinks hysterically. Just like a good dog.

She lets the muscles drain and sink to the floor, slowly relaxing joint by joint. All of her focus is wrapped up in cutting the strings to to her limbs, playing a limp marionette. Maia’s body is loose but her mind is tightly wound, so collapsed within itself and focused on the few rattles of breath that she allows herself. Playing dead.

It’s hours, or maybe minutes, or even seconds. It’s an impossibly long stretch of time punctuated by Maia’s imperceptible sighs of breath, a gap of chaos, before the sounds start to settle, before the _thump!_  of bodies slamming onto the grease-stained floors of the Jade Wolf begin to happen less so. Before it’s something like an end. Maia waits.

Voices filter in and out of what her ears can pick up. It’s low, harsh and frantic. Eventually those dim too, followed by the snap of a door shutting and a _ding!_  — the small plastic bell ringing to let staff know that customers were leaving, entering, coming and going as they please. Still, Maia waits.

When her body starts to cramp, and the shooting pain in her back becomes too much to handle, finally Maia moves. First with big, gasping breaths, following by every nerve in her body trying to kick off at once. She can’t hold back her cries now, every shift in movement sending stabs of pain back tenfold. Grunting, straining, and dizzy enough to pass out, Maia finally pushes herself off the ground. With hardly a sense of balance to stand on her own, she lumbers and sways until she pushes past the back doors of the Jade Wolf, leaving the dead behind.

-

Maia makes it two steps out the door before doubling over. Her knuckles and knees scrape harshly against the ground to catch her fall, and she promptly heaves her guts out.

She drags her arm across her mouth to clean off the worst of it, wheezing through the new points of pain. Her mind is a mix of adrenaline and exhaustion, too tired to string a coherent though together, but too wired to do anything less than panic.

Maia tries to breathe through it. It’s not the same as before. She can’t shut everything down, zero in on the problem and _focus_.

No, Maia’s state of mind is in tatters. For a hysterical moment, she wants nothing more than to pass out again, to let her mind slip into darkness and forget the past 24 hours. Maybe then, she’d wake up again and realize it was just a very horrible, disturbing dream.

Right.

It doesn’t matter what she wants, what matters is what needs to be done. So Maia focuses.

Crouching over the pavement, Maia’s breathing starts to slow down. She starts with her hands. Flexing and testing the joints, it’s nothing internal, just a few scrapes. Arms and legs next.

Her heartbeat still thrums erratically, but her legs are fine. Her arms, on the other hand, are scratched and still profusely bleeding. There’s smatterings of purple blue brown bruises that pattern across Maia’s shoulder, but she doesn’t feel anything worse than that. And even if she did, it would have to wait.

Her lungs stop jumping out of her ribcage, and her heart starts to settle. Which, of course, is when Maia realizes that her head _really hurts_. She brushes a hand across her forehead and comes back with a dark smear of blood. And the pounding racket in her head is probably an indicator of something worse. So much for walking away unscathed.

Unscathed, _Jesus_ , she’s alive. That’s more than she can say for the crime scene behind her. And it is a crime scene, Maia realizes. That much fighting couldn’t have gone unnoticed, and mundane cops are all too eager to keep an eye on this side of town. She had to — what, turn herself in as a witness? Flee as a suspect?

More than anything, she had to get help. Shadow-World-kind of help. Luke would know what to do. Or, maybe he wouldn’t. But at least he would come over, and assume some kind of authority that Maia could project onto. Hell, maybe he’d just show up to talk her down from flinging herself out onto the nearest highway.

In some werewolf packs, the kind where people are born and live their whole lives connected to family, they say that the power of an Alpha is passed down. That when one dies, the next in line takes control without question.

Maia doesn’t share blood with these people. But they were still the family that she had. And she can taste the truth at her throat, the new keenness that she didn’t have before, urging her to take control. She doesn’t have time to play wolf, though.

But Maia’s cellphone isn’t in her pocket, and she’s realizing at the same time that it’s because she left it in the Jade Wolf. And therein lies the dilemma: if Maia walks back in, to the sight and stench of mangled bodies and fresh blood, she might actually follow through on that highway threat.

Maia curses, her panic finally starting to settle. The realization that she was collapsed in a back alley, reeking of blood, sweat and vomit, replaced it. Fine. If Maia wasn’t going to turn back, she had no choice but to move forward. Nothing like an impossibly long walk to the Institute to keep her steady.

It’s only minutes before Maia registers the sound of sirens, fading in and out, but growing louder. She’s imagining the scene: cops filing in, picking their way through the dead. Probably kicking a few in the head with careless grace. What would they think? Would they see the bites and slashes, and conclude a cultish serial killer? A rabid animal attack? The inconclusive evidence would leave their heads spinning for days, before chalking it up to gang violence. Muttering to each other that what else would you expect from this part of town, from these people.

It didn’t matter. The Shadowhunters, she knew, would take control of the situation, Invoke a few misdirections and mind wipes, and the mundanes would be none the wiser. Maia just hopes that the Nephilim believe the real thing.

But if they would, Maia didn’t get a chance to know. At that moment, the snap and crackle of a fire message speeds toward her. It’s a scrap of paper with inky black scrawl.

_Not safe. — A.L._

She won’t realize until later that her whole body was trembling. For now, Maia feels strangely disconnected from her body as she crumples the message in her fist.

She didn’t know the oldest Lightwood well. When they had first met that night in Magnus’s loft, for a party she was being paid more than enough for, all Maia could remember was that Alec had the same furrowed brow as Jace Herondale. She never really separated him from being the brother Jace was willing to die for.

The Institute was Maia’s last resort, and now Alec Lightwood was telling her it wasn’t a choice at all. Her eyes are wet, she realizes. In that moment she feels very alone and the most scared she’s been all night.

Maia stops trying to fight the burning behind her eyes, and lets the first tear fall. The rest are quick to follow. Her breathing turns ragged, gasping in short hiccups as she curls in on herself.

It’s almost pathetic, but she can’t pretend to hold it back any longer. Maia doesn’t have a plan, doesn’t have a number to call or a person to turn to. She has nothing but the feeling of her throat closing up, of her gasps turning more frantic as she tries to push herself through the worst of the panic.

It’s late, by the time shudders stop wracking their way through Maia’s body. By then, she’s covered enough miles to make her toes curl in her worn-out sneakers. She finds herself in an old apartment building, feet pacing on a faded carpet. The door in front of her is styled like an antique, an iron knocker bolted just a few inches above her nose. Maia’s _rap rap rap_  was quick, and her fingers curl and uncurl with expectation.

Finally, a young man unlocks the door, hair disheveled and struggling to cover a yawn. His eyes widen once he sees the blood and bruises across Maia’s body.

“Hi.” Maia says. “I don’t have a lot of time. Can I come in?”

“Maia,” Bat Velasquez stares back, baffled by the state of her. “What the _hell_ happened?”

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me at immune-lydia.tumblr.com.


End file.
